In 2012, Leanne Perice published a paper about Jay-Z. The subject was a rapper; the question was what happened around the rapping. Brand partnerships, an expanding business identity, the ability to remain commercially interesting when the market changed. She was a recent Indiana University graduate looking closely at the machinery of an artist’s career. Fourteen years later, she is helping build some machinery of her own.
Perice founded the Los Angeles talent management company MADE BY ALL in 2017. She now also serves as co-CEO of MADE BY US Studios, which has announced entertainment partnerships with Dentsu and TikTok. The distance between a journal article and a studio sounds considerable. In her case, the intellectual journey is shorter: a person makes something people care about, and a business grows around that relationship. What should the person get to build next?
The Jay-Z paper came first
Her article, Music Entrepreneurs in the Twenty-First Century: A Case Study on the Career of Jay-Z, appeared in the Journal of the Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association. It examined an artist adapting to changing tastes and commercial conditions, using partnerships and businesses beyond recorded music. Perice was interested in how a creative identity could become broad enough to support several kinds of enterprise.
There is something pleasing about finding the early paperwork. Many careers acquire a tidy origin story after the fact. Here, an undergraduate paper supplies a dated expression of the interest. The manager who would later help creators consider products, investments and entertainment had already spent time thinking about the artist as entrepreneur. The vocabulary would change. The practical problem would remain recognizable.
Her own education mixed management with arts administration. She graduated with honors from Indiana University in May 2012, earning a Bachelor of Science in Public Affairs and a certificate in Arts Administration. Study abroad took her to Oxford’s Saïd Business School and Florence’s Lorenzo de’ Medici. She came from New Jersey and was building a working life in Los Angeles. Creative ambition and business study were already sharing the timetable.
An intern with an eye on the room
At Interscope Records in 2011, Perice encountered the strategic brand-partnership side of the music business. Companies could fund marketing around musicians and help their work travel. It was an introduction to the commercial relationship between an artist, an audience and a brand with something to sell. A record company offered a useful place to observe it.
Observation, however, had its limits. During that internship, she decided she wanted an artist to manage. On her first night out in Los Angeles, she saw a DJ and decided to approach him. An email led to management work. The anecdote has the appealing lack of ceremony common to first attempts: she identified the job she wanted, then found someone for whom she could try doing it.
In June 2012, Joe Magnetico & Associates announced her appointment as director of marketing and artist development. The announcement described an outgoing personality and an appetite for the industry. Later work at a celebrity endorsement agency gave her experience negotiating partnerships and helping develop a digital division. She was learning how the deal worked, while becoming increasingly interested in the career surrounding it.
The early business used the name Music Brand Agency. As the assignment shifted toward digital talent management, the name became an awkward fit. Perice recalled keeping it for three years despite disliking it. MADE BY ALL eventually supplied something more accommodating. A company name can be a small administrative detail until your ambitions start bumping into it.
Forty clients, three letters
By March 2026, Perice described a roster of 40 creators. She spoke about keeping the business selective. That choice matters because management becomes more complicated as a client’s possibilities expand. Someone seeking a product business needs a different conversation from someone hoping to develop entertainment. The attention required cannot be supplied by adding another name to a spreadsheet.
Creators on the roster she described in March 2026.
A dated snapshot of a deliberately selective business.
Her management framework uses the company’s initials: MBA. Meaningful content comes first, followed by brand amplification and access. The sequence begins with a creator’s work and identity, then considers how commercial partners understand it and which rooms the creator needs to enter. It is a compact way of organizing a job that can otherwise become a collection of incoming requests.
Her definition of becoming a household name extends across generations. That is a demanding ambition for work often consumed in seconds. It asks whether people remember the person and understand what they stand for after the clip has passed. For a manager, the answer affects which opportunities deserve time, which collaborations make sense and how far a familiar format might travel.
The business beyond the booking
In 2019, Perice established a product-development division to co-found companies and brands with clients. The intention was to diversify income and build equity in owned intellectual property. She also developed social-venture work involving consumer brands and technology startups. A commercial relationship could take the form of a business interest as well as a campaign.
These are different assignments with different clocks. A sponsored post has deliverables and a completion date. A product business needs decisions after launch. An ownership interest ties some of the reward to what happens later. Perice’s expanding remit brings those questions into management: what does a creator want to spend years working on, and what help will make that possible?
She also pays attention to the people across the negotiating table. In February 2026, she discussed the disruption caused by turnover among chief marketing officers. A relationship built with one executive can lose momentum when that person leaves. It is a decidedly practical obstacle to grand talk about the creator economy. A strategy still needs someone at the brand who remembers why everyone agreed to it.
Perice’s emphasis on continuing relationships fits that concern. Understanding a creator takes time; so does helping a brand understand the opportunity. The useful work sits in the particulars: the person’s interests, the audience’s expectations, the commercial partner’s priorities. When those things move, the manager has to keep the conversation moving with them.
“Just start and don’t overthink it.”
Leanne Perice, on advice to aspiring founders, 2024
A studio enters the picture
MADE BY US introduced another level of involvement. The venture began as a cultural marketing and content division in 2025. Its evolution into a studio brought Perice together with co-CEO Tanya Cohen, whose background includes entertainment packaging at Range Media Partners. Perice’s experience with digital talent met a collaborator accustomed to assembling projects in film and television.
The studio model places creators closer to the beginning of development. There is a distinction between being invited to appear in someone else’s idea and helping shape an idea before it has become a production. That earlier position creates room to discuss authorship, ownership and audience from the outset. It also gives the manager a larger set of practical problems to solve.
On June 17, 2026, Dentsu Entertainment announced an exclusive, multi-year partnership with MADE BY US Studios. The planned work spans scripted, unscripted and animated entertainment. Brands can become involved during development, bringing commercial conversations forward to the first idea. For Perice, it extends the partnership business she learned in music into the making of original entertainment.
October supplied a more specific view of the slate. TikTok announced a partnership to co-produce creator-led vertical micro-series for TikTok and PineDrama. The first projects announced included Player, a romantic revenge thriller starring Hannah Stocking, who also has co-story and executive-producer credits, and The Knock, a genre series starring Adam Rose opposite Zaria Simone. The titles make the studio ambition easier to picture: characters, scripts and roles for creators within a production.
Dentsu announces an exclusive entertainment partnership.
TikTok announces a slate of vertical micro-series.
MADE BY SPOOKY horror label announced with Image Nation Studios and Spooky Pictures.
On October 21, MADE BY US, Image Nation Studios and Spooky Pictures announced MADE BY SPOOKY, a label for creator-focused horror across short, vertical and long-form projects. First projects were expected in 2027. The development slate is expanding into genres and formats. Announcements describe the intended work; the productions will give that intention its substance.
What the audience makes possible
The company also makes room for work away from entertainment. Its community projects include building six houses for families below the poverty line to mark six years in business. A Thanksgiving collaboration with Tao Cares prepared more than 450 meals for Covenant House in Los Angeles. These are tangible uses of the relationships gathered around a management company: people brought together to do a job with a visible result.
That sense of organizing people runs through Perice’s career. There is the young graduate studying a musician’s wider business, the intern approaching a DJ, the founder adding products to the management assignment, and the executive bringing production partners into a creator’s plans. Each stage asks her to take a creative ambition seriously enough to work out who else needs to help.
Her early paper sits at one end of that progression, the studio slate at the other. Between them is a sustained interest in what an artist can become when the business makes room. The question has acquired more participants, larger responsibilities and a horror label. Perice is still working on the answer.